Serps tied to Adwords Buy?

Hi. A couple years back, a site of mine was always in the top 3 organically on page one of Google. That site has struggled over the past 18 months or so with all of the changes at Google. During that time I was not doing any Adwords campaigns. A few months ago I started my campaigns up again, and was surprised recently that I was number one organically on page one - for the first time in nearly two years. So I decided to test whether this was related to the Adwords campaigns - so I paused all of my campaigns. Within a week or so I dropped to the bottom of page one organically. I turned the ads back on....shot back up to number 2 within 3 days. It certainly feels like I have to pay for organic results. Anybody else experiencing this?

3 Responses

I've never personally experienced this. I'm very skeptical of Google in general but when it comes down to it I have never seen any evidence myself of this type of thing going on. In fact, my custom t-shirt company grew from 2007-2012 without any paid going at all outside of branded search. We started doing lots of paid late in 2012 and some of 2013 and our rankings dropped during that time. Now, there is some evidence that having an ad present on the page can increase the CTR of your organic listings which I assume could also raise your organic rankings through the CTR increase. I wouldn't expect it to drive you from the bottom of the page to the top but I could see it making some difference. Here is a fairly in depth discussion of the CTR stuff from both sides http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2166156/Google-Paid-Search-Ads-With-Associated-Organic-Result-Have-Higher-CTR-Study